What's your emotional style? Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence, writes in his blog about research being done by Richard Davidson, the director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin:

As I’ve described in Social Intelligence cortisol can behelpful at lower levels; it’s crucial for mobilizing us to meet the
demands of the day. But when cortisol surges through the body at high
levels and stays there, we get stuck in emotional overdrive. This,
Davidson tells me, impacts our health. David Spiegel at Stanford
Medical School found that among women with metastatic breast cancer,
those whose cortisol failed to go down at the end of the day ended up
dying of cancer sooner.

...whatever our emotional style, the very circuitry of
the brain that determines it also happens to be the most plastic – that
is, able to change with experience.

In our conversation [Davidson] describes the good news: how mindfulness
practice can help us modify these brain styles for the better.